In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Reading Daily Can Actually Add a Year to Your Life Here's How Scientists Are Using Machine Learning to Predict the Unpredictable The Heartwarming Story of Indonesia's Chicken Church
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/daily-reading-benefits-chicken-church-and-machine-learning-to-predict-chaos
CODY GOUGH: Hi, we've got three stories from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you'll learn about how reading daily can actually add a year to your life, how scientists are using machine learning to predict the unpredictable, and the heartwarming story of Indonesia's chicken church.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some curiosity. All right, Ashley, what's your favorite thing about reading?
ASHLEY HAMER: That I learn something every time I do it.
CODY GOUGH: Well, I have something that you might even enjoy more than that, and it's living longer.
ASHLEY HAMER: Ooh.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. About a quarter of American adults report not having read a book in the last year.
ASHLEY HAMER: Geez.
CODY GOUGH: That's especially bad news, because a recent study proves that reading can actually make you live longer, as in older adults who read books for at least 30 minutes a day live an average of 23 months longer than those who don't read at all.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: So nearly two years longer. The data comes from Health and Retirement Study, HRS, a biennial study that's been examining the health of retired people since 1992. They compared people who read books to people who didn't and found that book readers also tend to be less depressed and more educated and wealthier than their non-reading counterparts.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. So did the reading cause that? Probably not, but there's a link between reading and lifespan. Probably associated with some of those elements too.
CODY GOUGH: Right. And all of those factors, obviously, being less depressed, more educated, stuff like that, has a positive effect on lifespan. Now, the readers versus non-readers tended to skew female, but more surprisingly, the readers were also much more likely to be blind or suffer from some form of visual impairment.
ASHLEY HAMER: Huh. Interesting.
CODY GOUGH: Anyway, the researchers won't say for sure where these benefits come from, but they hypothesize the books give the brain the chance to soothe and recharge itself, especially during what they call "deep reading," and that's when you aren't just going over the words, but you're actively engaging with the characters and concepts and thinking hard about the information the book presents you.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's a reason to read books, if I've ever heard one.
CODY GOUGH: It certainly is, so pick up a book.
ASHLEY HAMER: Have you ever heard of the "butterfly effect"?
CODY GOUGH: I've seen the movie The Butterfly Effect.
ASHLEY HAMER: How did you like it?
CODY GOUGH: Ashton Kutcher. It's a surprisingly good movie.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, it is pretty good. It's disturbing.
CODY GOUGH: It's dark.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: But it's a great film.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Well, the name of that movie is based on an actual effect, called the "butterfly effect," which is the idea that really tiny actions, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, can have massive consequences, like triggering a tornado in Texas. The butterfly effect says that there are some things that even the most advanced science can never predict. Well, that list of things just got a lot shorter.
This is super exciting. Scientists from the University of Maryland have used machine learning to predict chaos. So generally, when scientists want to make predictions about chaotic systems, like weather or the stock market, they measure as much as they can measure and then create a computer model, and then they see what that model does next. But in a series of recently published papers, chaos theorist Edward Ott and his colleagues tried a different approach. They used a machine learning algorithm called "reservoir computing" to repeatedly measure, predict, test, and fine-tune those predictions about a chaotic system until they were as accurate as possible.
They tested the algorithm by having it predict how a wall of flame would behave as it moved through a combustible medium, like a sheet of paper. The technical term for this is the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, and that's also used to study things like plasma waves and air turbulence. You can read all about the technical details of how the algorithm worked out the problem on curiosity.com. But the result was that they predicted the future evolution of that flame wall roughly eight times further ahead than any other method ever could.
Natalie Wolchover, who I'm a huge fan of, by the way, wrote in Quanta that to do that with a model, quote, "You'd have to measure a typical system's initial conditions 100 million times more accurately to predict its future evolution eight times further ahead," unquote.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: This is a big deal because it could help us predict things that are really hard to model. Think weather forecasts, tsunami predictions, earthquake warnings, or you might be able to monitor heart rhythm for impending heart attacks, or neuron firing patterns for impending seizures. You could even monitor the sun to get advance warning about devastating solar storms. We might be able to combine this new approach with existing modeling techniques to get even better predictions.
CODY GOUGH: That's awesome. So we can finally get accurate weather forecasts.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, maybe. It's possible.
CODY GOUGH: And they would be further out, right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Yes, they would.
CODY GOUGH: Up to eight times?
ASHLEY HAMER: This is eight times. I don't know about weather. Weather is another thing. But it's very exciting and very hopeful.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah, I like it. Have you ever been to a chicken church?
ASHLEY HAMER: I've been to a church's chicken.
CODY GOUGH: Ho-ho. Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: You didn't see that coming?
CODY GOUGH: All right, podcast is over. No, I did not. I did not see that coming. That was phenomenal. Well, there is a chicken church.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Not a church's chicken, but a chicken church.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
CODY GOUGH: You might have heard of Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, which is on the Indonesian island of Java. But 15 minutes to the west of the temple, if you head just a little bit into the jungle, you'll find yourself standing in a clearing, looking up at the largest chicken you've ever seen.
ASHLEY HAMER: Why? What is it?
CODY GOUGH: It's a church. It's called Gereja Ayam, and it's the chicken church. It's a church that looks like a chicken. You can see pictures and read the heartwarming story behind the church on curiosity.com, but I'll sum it up for you. Basically, you can thank Daniel Alamsjah for building it. In 1988, Alamsjah said he started having visions and dreams of a peaceful snow-white dove resting on a hill. He didn't tell anybody about the visions, but he visited one of his employees on his day off. And they visited a spot where he saw a hill that looked just like the one in his dream.
So two weeks later, Alamsjah bought an acre of land for a couple of thousand bucks, and just like Kevin Costner had to build a baseball field in Field Of Dreams, Alamsjah had to build a church shaped like a dove. He was forced to stop construction after eight years, at which point it looked a little bit more like a chicken.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wait, why did it look like a chicken if it was a dove?
CODY GOUGH: It's because he put a crown on it that looked like a waddle.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh. That gets you every time.
CODY GOUGH: It sure does. But there's a heartwarming end to the story. A lot of tourists have started visiting in the last decade or so, and the church has been able to use that money to finally start putting the finishing touches on rooms that were never completed. And now the dirt floors have been replaced with jeweled tiles by local artisans, and the plain walls have been transformed with gorgeous full-cover murals depicting the history of Indonesia. It's pretty impressive, and if you visit, then you can see it, too, for a whopping $0.72.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow. What a deal.
CODY GOUGH: It is an "eggcellent" deal.
ASHLEY HAMER: I believe the exchange rate on that is 10,000 rupiahs.
CODY GOUGH: That's what the article says.
ASHLEY HAMER: That's what the article says.
CODY GOUGH: Certainly, for a price that low, you cannot cry "fowl."
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, god.
[BOTH LAUGH]
You can read all about these stories and so much more on curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Today, also, we released our final weekly full-length Curiosity podcast episode, at least for now. We've got a variety of interviews and clips from past guests, both old and new, in this full-length episode, so please check it out. And now that Memorial Day weekend is coming to kick off the summer, we're going to just focus on daily episodes like this one for a while, anyway, but check out our season finale of the weekly show. I think it's a lot of fun. Ashley, you had a blast recording it.
ASHLEY HAMER: I did. I had a lot of fun. There was a lightning round where you asked me a bunch of questions, so you can learn a whole bunch of stuff in just a few minutes, just like on this podcast.
CODY GOUGH: Exactly.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
SPEAKER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.